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📖 THE CHILL THAT MUSIC LEAVES

The fascinating chill that music leaves
is Earth's corroboration
Of Exstasy's impediment -
'Tis Rapture's germination
In timid and tumultuous soil
A fine - estranging creature -
To something upper wooing u
But not to our Creator -

Emily Dickinson

📖 "No Life without art, no art without life."

Leschetitzky

📖 POEM: MUSIC - X - SEA AND SHORE

Music, I yield to thee;
As swimmer to the sea
I give my Spirit to the flood of song:
Bear me upon thy breast
In rapture and at rest,
Bathe me in pure delight and make me strong;
From strife and struggle bring release,
And draw the waves of passion into tides of peace.

Remember'd songs, most dear,
In living songs I hear,
While blending voices gently swing and sway
In melodies of love,
Whose mighty currents move,
With singing near and singing far away;
Sweet in the glow of morning light,
And sweeter still across the starlit gulf of night.

Music, in thee we float,
And lose the lonely note
Of self in thy celestial-ordered strain,
Until at last we find
The life to love resigned
In harmony of joy restored again;
And songs that cheered our mortal days
Break on the coast of light in endless hymns of praise.

December, 1901 - May, 1903.

Henry van Dyke

📖 "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides!"
Artur Schnabel

📖 POEM: ARTHUR SCHNABEL

Alone with him on a train journey I asked
What is music? He answered

The conflict of form and freedom

and that when he sat down to play
a great Schubert sonata
he had not settled which of thirty
distinct interpretations
(each of course realising all
Schubert's indications)
to try, that day

Boldest teacher and player he was afraid
to practise much - feared
virtuosity insidiously
smoothing spontaneity,
narcissism edging in front of music

Imagine a new freedom and imagine
its own form to convey it and immediate
a fresh freedom to burst
this
never let
freedom get dispersed
a form set

Often he would say
I want to play only
music which is better than me

The music he wrote
was way out

Years later I heard Lotte Lenya tell
how one evening at Kurt Weill's
they had been strenuously discussing
a revered pianist's recital
and Schnabel (eagerest talker0 had said nothing …
- chaffed
said at last
I didn't like it … He has such a noisy spiritual life

Schnabel played as if
hearing - then - the composer show the way

Jonathan Griffin The Fact of Music (1980)

Some Great Piano Recordings

"Musik soll nicht schmücken. Sie soll wahr sein." Arnold Schönberg

"Music itself is the purest expression of emotion. To me, emotion is the guts of the theatre. With music you can say in one moment what an author would take a whole scene to tell you in a drama."
Joshua Logan

Argerich

Prokofiev Toccata

Arrau

Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 32

Busoni

Busoni player Bach-Busoni and Beethoven

Edwin Fischer

JS Bach Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 Prelude and Fugue C Major BWV 846

Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue

Beethoven Piano Sonata Op. 111 No. 32

Ignaz Friedman

Bach Toccata and Fugue D Minor

Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould's US television debut with Bernstein
Bach Keyboard Concerto D Minor BWV 1052

Myra Hess

Bach-Hess Jesu, Joy and Man's Desiring
Scarlatti

Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 30 E Major Op. 109

Hofmann

Liszt Venezia e Napoli

Kissin

Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1 E Minor Op. 11
Kissin at 13 in 1985

Alicia de Larrocha

Leschetizky

Theodor Leschetizky plays Mozart Fantasia in C minor K 475

Josef Lhevinne

Josef Lhevinne plays Sinding "The Rustle of Spring" (Frühlingsrauschen)
Piano roll

Josef Lhevinne plays Liszt-Busoni La Campanella

Dinu Lipatti

Dinu Lipatti - Bach Chorale Prelude BWV 659 Nun komm,der Heiden Heiland

Michelangeli

Debussy Reflets dans l'eau from Images Book 1

Scarlatti Sonata B Minor

Moiseiwitsch

Moiseiwitsch plays Rachmaninov Prelude in B minor Op. 32 No. 10

Murray Perahia

Mozart Piano Concerto No.27 K.595

Rachmaninov plays

Rachmaninov plays Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 3 D Minor Op. 30

Richter

Chopin Revolutionary Etude

Schubert-Liszt Erlkönig

Rubinstein

Bach-Busoni Chaconne

Sofronitsky

Scriabin Etude D# minor Op.8 No.12

Scriabin Poème-Nocturne Op. 61

Sokolov

Vera Timanova

Vera Timanova plays Paul de Schlözer Etude Op. 1 No. 2 in A flat major

Volodos

Volodos-Bizet Carmen Variations after Vladimir Horowitz

Rachmaninov-Volodos Italian Polka

Volodos plays Turkish March

Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No.3
With James Levine and Berliner Philharmoniker

Liszt Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi sonata
From Années de pèlerinage II, Deuxième année: Italie, S. 161, No. 7, "Dante Sonata"
Arcadi Volodos at Musikverein, Vienna

Anna Yessipova

Verdi-Liszt "Rigoletto" Fantasy Paraphrase
Recorded in 1906

D'Albert Scherzo in F sharp Op. 16 No. 2
Welte Mignon Piano Roll